Please watch and spread around. They are identical, except for the endings. Each is less than two minutes long! Please choose one and send it to your Eureka contacts, share on your social media, tweet about them, ‘like’ them on your you tube channel!

We will have a table set up about the Eureka Fair Wage Act / Measure R all day at the Pride festival. Dedicated Fair Wage folk, Sarah Torres, with her amazing voice and guitar skills, will perform her original songs on stage with BeTHIsBell. It will be a collaboration not to be missed! Both Sarah and Beth have consistently shared their music at the Fair Wage Cafes, Arts Alive, and many street concerts in support of the Fair Wage Act.

***FAIR WAGE CAFE

11th Fair Wage Cafe September 27, 2014

The Cafe is family-friendly, community building, relaxing, and fun event. All free! A large buffet of delicious, nutritious food and sweets with coffee, tea, and juice; fabulous live local music; games for kids (plus a playground and a large grassy area for running around); guest speakers; space for informational tables about your projects or organizations; ways to help raise the minimum wage; and an open setting where you can be social or just eat, listen to the music, read the materials, relax.

If you need to register or know people who do, please call or email us. (707) 442-7465, info@fairwages.org We will bring you a registration form. It only takes a couple of minutes to fill out. We all can win this if we vote for higher wages.

We also have laminated window signs for your home, office, or vehicle.

***VOLUNTEER Volunteer any evening to help pass Measure R.(707) 442-7465, info@fairwages.org Knocking on doors and talking with Eureka residents continues every evening. Please find some time to join us for a couple of hours. We will do a short preparation and you will go out with an experienced person, so don’t worry if you’ve never done anything like this.Also, if you can help us put information into a spreadsheet, from your own home, that would be super helpful!***DAILY BANNER ACTION

Stand with the Fair Wage banner! We have a beautiful YES ON R banner that we can display every day to thousands of passers-by on Broadway. Don, one of the drafters of the Fair Wage Act (Measure R) and a proud Fair Wage Folk, needs one person every weekday to accompany him in sitting or standing with the banner at Wabash and Broadway. Please contact us if you would be willing to hold the professionally made banner (donated by Jim Signs) for two hours with Don. Don will provide transportation to and from the spot on Broadway. Guaranteed laughs with Don, too!

Help get the last money together for PARC rent! PARC has been the main organizing space/office for the Fair Wage Folks. PARC still needs $150 for September rent. Please donate if you can.parc.2truth.com click on “Give Now”

[This is a separate donation link, etc then The Fair Wage Folks. PARC does not have a state committee campaign number, just a bunch of grass roots!]

***LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Write a letter to the editor in support of Measure R. It would be good to see one every day in the Times-Standard and North Coast Journal. A letter does not need to be complicated- could simply say why you support Measure R.

Very Important: We have an immediate need for volunteers to help us CANVASS in Eureka. No experience required! And you don’t have to live in Eureka to help. We have been knocking on doors every day, and we need more people. We will prepare you to canvass for Measure R, provide simple outreach supplies, and pair you up with a person who has experience. Then we’ll hit the streets, talk with Eureka residents about the fight for $12 in Eureka, and register more voters. We’ve registered about 350 Eureka residents so far!

WE NEED YOUR HELP TO RAISE WAGES

We need you to VOLUNTEER your time and energy to help with phone calls, data entry, sign delivery, tabling at events, graphic art, etc.- your skills are needed.

YARD SIGNS for Measure R are being made by a small, local printing shop. Very exciting! Let us know if you’d like us to bring you a yard sign (or a smaller window sign) to display at your home or business in support of the Fair Wage Act! Here’s what it looks like.

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We’re hosting another outdoor FAIR WAGE CAFE at Cesar Chavez Park (Hammond Park), at 14th and F, Eureka (with the tennis courts and playground). It will be held sometime in September, on a Saturday. We’ll finalize the date soon. Enjoy nutritious, yummy food, live local music, kid’s games, and family fun from 12noon to 5pm. Bring friends, co-workers, neighbors, and the whole family out for a day in the park! It’s all free!

Measure R recently received the unanimous endorsement of the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee. Our thanks to them for their support of Measure R, and we’re pleased to add them to the growing list of organizations and individuals that stand behind Eureka’s working families.

Endorsers of Measure R, the Eureka Fair Wage Act, we thank you:

Humboldt and Del Norte Central Labor Council

Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee

Roosevelt Institute at Humboldt State University

Humboldt County Green Party

SEIU Local 1021- a union of 54,000 workers in Northern California

United Food and Commercial Workers Local #5

Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Social Action Committee

Progressive Democrats

Operating Engineers Union local #3

Building and Construction Trades Council of Humboldt and Del Norte Counties

Eureka City Council member Linda Atkins

former Eureka City Council member Chris Kerrigan

Natalie Arroyo*

Kim Bergel*

(*We hope Natalie Arroyo and Kim Bergel will be Eureka City Council members in the near future)

Brave New Films, a non-profit documentary film company, is making a pro-minimum wage raise video that will be ready by Labor Day weekend. They have contacted us, and we will have the video to show on Access Humboldt, the internet, wherever we (and you) can spread it. It will include Eureka’s Measure R information!

Please consider giving a FINANCIAL DONATION of any amount to the Measure R campaign. It is run solely by volunteers in the community. Donations will help us print important campaign materials, fund radio spots, and help pay for web space. Donate today at FAIRWAGES.ORG. You can mail us a contribution, donate online, hand us money, a check, or money order in person– however it works for you!

If you haven’t seen our new website, please go to its easy-to-remember address, fairwages.org. Also, we continue to host the blog, eurekafairwageact.wordpress.com where, for almost two years, we’ve been posting research, news, events, etc. about raising wages.

We’re on Facebook. “Friend” us at Fair Wage Folks. “Like” us at Eureka Fair Wage Act and Measure R.

“Fast food workers are walking out on their jobs today to once again protest low wages, demand the right to unionize and fight for better working conditions. The strikes are occurring in 50 cities including New York City, where there are multiple walk-outs plus a rally planned.

The first walkout was at the McDonald’s at 341 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn was there, as was City Council Member and Public Advocate hopeful Letitia James. James invoked Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the civil rights leader, “It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.””

“NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fast-food workers staged strikes at McDonald’s and Burger Kings and demonstrated at other stores in sixty U.S. cities on Thursday in their latest action in a nearly year-long campaign to raise wages in the service sector.

The strikes spread quickly across the country and have shut down restaurants in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Raleigh and Seattle, according to organizers.”

Chicago Fast Food, Retail Workers Go On Strike For Higher Wages

Photo credit: Ryan L. Williams
Hundreds of retail and fast food workers went on a coordinated strike this morning to call for a living wage of $15 an hour and the right to unionize without interference.

The Fair Wage folks urge you to get involved in passing the Eureka Fair Wage Act, also known as the Minimum Wage Ordinance. If passed through a popular vote, the Act would require large employers with 25 or more workers in Eureka to pay a $12 dollar minimum wage. A higher minimum wage, with a small business exception, will improve lives, make Walmart reconsider its presence in Eureka, boost the local economy, bring employment up, and allow individuals who work full time to rise just above the federal poverty level.

Meetings for the Eureka Fair Wage Act are now every Wednesday at 6:15pm at the Eureka Labor Temple, 840 E Street. More information can be found and questions answered by visiting the Eureka Fair Wage Act website, fairwages.org, or by calling 707-442-7465. If you are interested in helping the campaign in any way, wherever you live, please get in contact.

Concerned about the fact that Eureka’s workers’ median income level is only 51% of the statewide average, Clark and Atkins feel that raising the minimum wage is a necessary first step, as part of a comprehensive effort to get Eureka’s economy back on track.

The article also featured the reaction of Linda and George’s opponents in their race for Eureka City Council: Polly Endert and Frank Jäger respectively. “It’s totally the wrong approach,” according to Polly Endert and Frank Jäger added, “It’s a great idea, but it’s a job killer.” The evidence shows minimum wage initiatives are neither “totally wrong” nor “job killers.” They are, however, often resisted by entrenched moneyed interests whose influence in this campaign once again threatens the future of Eureka’s working families. When it comes to raising the minimum wage, Linda Atkins and George Clark feel the facts should speak for themselves.

Over the past 12 years around 140 States and Municipalities have enacted living wage measures and 29 states and the District of Columbia all operate with minimum wages above the Federal standard. There is now a rich body of evidence in this area, none of which supports Jäger or Endert’s claims. In 1995 and in a subsequent study in 2000, David Card and Alan Krueger, “consistently found that changes in the minimum wage have not tended to raise unemployment by any discernible amount (and indeed have tended to be associated with slight increases in low-wage employment.”

In 1998 a survey of professional economists at forty leading research universities in the field of labor and public economics published by Victor Fuchs of Stanford and Alan Krueger and James Poterba of MIT conclude that, “the general professional view is, again, that there were no strong negative employment effects, if any, from raising the minimum wage by relatively modest amounts.”

Three more recent studies examining the impact of living wage laws in San Francisco and Los Angeles done in 2005 all agree: “None of these studies finds evidence of significant reductions associated with the implementation of living wages laws.”

A particularly interesting study was done from 2001 to 2005 comparing employment growth between 11 states that operated with minimum wage levels higher than the Federal standard and 33 others that did not. The states operating with the higher minimum wage experienced overall job growth of 0.57 %, while those that maintained the lower Federal minimum wage had a 0.52% growth rate. In other words employment growth was actually slightly faster in those states which paid minimum wages greater than the Federal level.

Given the enormous amount of evidence that contradicts Frank and Polly’s “sky is falling” reaction to the idea of raising the minimum wage for Eureka’s working families, are we to conclude that they simply don’t get it or is this what having “no agenda” means to them?

George Clark and Linda Atkins believe in building our economy from the ground up. Raising wages in Eureka, which are so far below the state average, is the right and fair thing to do for Eureka’s working families. When the spending power of working families goes up, so does morale, which leads to productivity boosts, lowers job turnover, all in an ongoing “virtuous cycle,” and everyone benefits. Furthermore, increased spending by Eureka’s workers creates more demand for products, helping businesses while creating more jobs in the process.”
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